Sword Art Online: Re:told
by Tim Bustin
Summary: The first arc rewritten, but now Kirito has depression and social anxiety. "Kazuto stared at the screen. It was glossy and black, but not reflective. He couldn't see himself, or little anything else inside of it. It was a window he couldn't see through, and at the same time a digital canvas, on which to paint a whole virtual world."


"_Nagai yume miru kokoro wa sou eien de/Because you're here with me, our dreams will soar free, forever." – Crossing Field_

Chapter 1: An Empty World

Everything in the world began with black.

SWORD ART ONLINE

Kazuto stared at the screen. It was glossy and black, but not reflective. He couldn't see himself, or little anything else inside of it. It was a window he couldn't see through, and at the same time a digital canvas, on which someone could paint a whole virtual world.

He waited patiently for the screens of his triple-monitor computer to boot up; there wasn't much to look at or see in his room that interested him otherwise.

It said, after his computer had loaded, in the lore page of Sword Art Online, that "it was rumoured the world of Fahemil – the world of the game Sword Art Online – had begun with black, and that one day black would return to Fahemil to end it. But it was known for certain that in the earliest days, Fahemil was a world of only sky."

This is a story, of a world inside the mind of its creator. The Allfather, Akihiko Kayaba, one day tired of the void of sky in his mind. Moments later, land rose, lush and green, and huge enough to make the void of sky no longer seem infinite. The land evolved with time and cultivation. Forests rose, then animals and plants, trees and flowers and wolves and rabbits – humans and deviations, like the underground dwarves, and the closely related dark elves; or the very different forest elves.

Kazuto had spent hours scanning those pages; now he almost had it memorised, in his own way.

Kayaba lost control of his world – in the same way that the subconscious can make decisions for us, or we can live a long, adventurous dream and then forget it moments after waking up. There were new creatures he didn't recognise, stories happening he hadn't set-up; the world had expanded and spread like tendrils through his mind, and he couldn't keep it all together by himself. The land started to fracture and crack; there was an earthquake that broke apart the land, threatening to destroy everything.

100 circles of land floated through the sky – fragments of the land. They floated up and down from the void of sky where there is no real direction, rearranging.

This is Aincrad – an incarnating radius of Fahemil; a castle in the sky, a mind of its own. Kayaba is inside of this world. He does not understand it; he has not explored its new boundaries, its new stories. He is inside Aincrad now, trying to figure it out – but he cannot do it alone. The sky has no boundaries. Anyone can enter inside of Fahemil now. Anyone can play Sword Art Online.

_It was really real_, Kazuto thought.

Three years ago, there hadn't been anything close to fulldive VR. Now, in 2022… _Argus __**finally**__ presents…_

It was cold and grey in his room. There was silence in the air, and Kazuto was glad for it.

There was rain outside. It was a grey day in Tokyo.

On another monitor was a world – a crowd of early-twenties males were grinning outside a shop in Shibuya district, waving their copies of SWORD ART ONLINE to the camera, before the news switched to a reporter standing before the long queues lining up outside the shop.

He had a stack of programming books on his shelf, but he didn't much read them. He wished he did more. If he was ever stuck in this room, which felt like a lot of his life, then he'd watch anime, or action-heavy Hollywood blockbusters – or play MMO RPGs. Not right now, though. He felt nervous now, which was stupid, he thought – but still, he could barely do anything. If he went to his desk he couldn't persuade himself to log onto WoW or GuildWars 2, and he wouldn't want to move back to his bed without being overwhelmed with a feeling of unsureness and nerves. Time was ticking away, though, even if slower than he'd like.

"I'm going out now!" A female voice, just a little younger than his. "You big nerd." A quiet pause. "Okay. Think mum's working late again tonight. Love you, big brother!" There was a gentle clattering noise just outside his door, and then her footsteps faded. Kazuto hoped the door was locked. He was sure it was. He really hoped.

"Bye."

There really wasn't much in Kazuto's room at all, besides the computer and the desk, and his bed. A wardrobe.

Earlier, a few days ago, he'd walked the city streets of Shibuya district. His home, Kawagoe City, was a suburb, and not even really in Tokyo. There was little reason to get on the train and ever visit the commercial areas. It had been a long way to go, though not too much time on the bullet train, and he'd ended up staying till the last train at midnight. He'd picked up his pre-ordered copy of SAO, then walked the city streets for hours on end. If people got in the way – and there were literally millions in Tokyo, and all crowded together too – he would want to get away. If someone walked behind close, not getting closer or further away but going at the same pace, he started to become unable to think clearly. He'd stop until the person passed, pretending to be interested in something in particular, like a food stall's menu, or a screen advert. There was a lot.  
The streets, at day, were busy in this megacity of a place. It was buildings, of different sizes and shapes and ugly or beauty, that all intrigued Kazuto, and made up most of the landscape, where there wasn't the odd park or open space, like the 4-way crossroads. Some of them curved – one from the front was a tall, slightly curved, sheet, divided into lines of windows vertically, and slightly less so horizontally; the dark colour and the silver lines looked like a prison cell, but sleek and glossy. The sky was reflected in it faintly – just the white shape of clouds, on the glossy, curved black. Right in the middle was an advert – a bright pink rectangle, and a moving woman, her eyes closed, her dark hair in a bob being tustled gently back and forth by an invisible wind. There was something in the image that opened a void in Kazuto's heart. He sighed heavily looking up at it.  
After a while he moved – and he looked again, and the building had changed shape, because he had walked around it, and he saw now that the front was just one side of the building – the building was 3D, and long, extending back a few hundred meters, and running parallel to it was a path he could walk down. His feet turned and he found himself down it. He found himself lost. He found himself, for a brief second, hurting from a memory – the spikey-haired Takeo kicking his shin as he passed, and giggling, calling him a girl as he did, and sprinted away with a friend; and Kazuto was angry, he wanted to hit back, to shout out, to hurt hum. He was angry now thinking about it, but then it was gone because he told it to be so, he looked at the buildings and focussed hard, and then he ran, and he ran down the pavement, going from site to sight. Night fell. There were no stars out out here; all their lights, instead, had fallen to earth. Tokyo was neon – red, and green, and pink, and blue – and it rained, leaving puddles in the ground that reflected back their lights in streaks, forming a reflection of what the night sky should have been. Technology was powerful, and taking over in many ways. Kazuto just found it all the more so beautiful. Takeo joked his family – his powerful, rich, businessman father – talked about how SAO was bankrupting Argus, and Akihiko Kayaba's business strategy meant SAO wouldn't last weeks after its launch. Kazuto panted, and wanted to scream, but there was nothing and too many people around. People he'd never seen. Tsutaya, and All Might – the Attack on Titan prequel series trailer, lists of food from English-themed food outlets, the VR gaming shop, Borderlands 4, and a million lights in the dark, like fireflies. He ran down alleyways and avenues, looking, searching, going around on whims. It all hurt so much.

He was sitting in his grey room, with nothing. He clenched his eyes shut and, after a moment, sighed. It still hurt. He put on 'Crossing Field' – the SAO promotional song used in the trailers – and sung, quietly, along:

"I was never right  
For the hero type of role  
I admit it  
With my heart,

Shivering in fear,  
I can see today's reflected in each past tear  
Even so

It has been calling the heavens, to me  
But I cannot hide, all the emptiness inside, my fleeting heart…"

After a while, he calmed. The music and the words made something easier. Life felt beautiful for just a moment. It was easy, to listen.

The world was so big, so he'd heard. He'd read about it online; he'd scroll aimlessly through Twitter most days. In the distance, he could see mountains. It was grey outside, but they were still, somewhat, beautiful, in that way – they loomed, but were so far away; they were huge and the end of the view, not the blocks of housing, the small office buildings further away, the roads and the slight ups and downs of Kawagoe. It was the mist, that covered and then revealed them, and the clouds that hid their tops, cutting off their true height, that even in the grey made Kazuto hold breath. They always held his gaze. They were close enough to actually visit. He'd read about the world and people; sometimes he thought he should care about politics, or people in Africa, or America with Trump's re-election, Europe and the EU's on-going issues, global warming, other words, things, just stuff he'd heard. What were people? He hated people.

There was a girl in his class, who sometimes asked him questions about the magazine he was reading, or other things, when he sat alone before class started or during lunchbreaks if he ate in the classroom. She'd talk just as her group of friends was leaving, and get a couple of questions in before having to catch up with them, leaving Kazuto feeling like he should have said something different or more, or just be confused. She had short hair, in a bob. Rika. He would eat his lunch, and read more about the one interview Kayaba gave – 'VR's into real fulldive territory, none of this illusionary stuff with gloves and cannisters releasing smells with headsets and earphones, and Argus is the one pushing this all forwards' – and look up at one point, and look out the window, past the different small groups sitting or talking, or on their phones and squashed together, laughing falsely and pretending, and see Rika from a distance – and then he'd get confused and look back at his magazine. He wondered if this meant he fancied her.

People made life difficult. They hid. He couldn't talk around them. He was quiet; they ignored him. He felt so alone, so often. He hated being in this house. And even though sometimes the emotions were very strong, mostly they were very quiet. When his family told him not to speak up, or to not disrespect the house by talking out of turn or saying anything potentially against ideas, or to think about his dream job in programming that he was going to do and they couldn't stop him, even from here… he didn't want to hate. He just didn't know what to do. Everything was difficult. The world was complicated, and it shouldn't be.

Fahemil. Aincrad. Akihiko Kayaba, the genius, the One. SWORD ART ONLINE.

He fell asleep for a short while. The covers were close and soft and grey – spread out like a horizon of cragged, softly curved mountains. It was easier to sleep for a bit. He was scared about having to interact with others; how he might have to act, how he might have to be different in that way that everyone pretended and made jokes or looked like they were confident. He didn't want much, he thought. He was going to be great. Everything was going to be okay. Everything was so confusing.

As he slept, his computer monitors went to screensaver mode – an array of shifting backgrounds, fading into the next one after about 30 seconds or so: desert sand dunes, crisply yellow, with a boldly light blue sky – and in the centre, the words ソードアート・オンライン (SWORD ART ONLINE)

…into a the top of some height, looking over the trees of a tropical rainforest, the size of Tokyo, a red-rockface on the side continuing the journey higher, and the sun orange and purple – and the same words were there, staying in place; purple and white mountains, and glint of the sun in the exact centre, just over a mountaintop, clouds spreading out its light like a star, in all directions – SWORD ART ONLINE. Castles; medieval markets; a graveyard; an ocean, and only ocean; temples; mud huts; a forest and lake.

SWORD ART ONLINE

He didn't know why, but he felt more alive in that world then he ever did in this real one.


End file.
